X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f996b,a179f9c5ece793af X-Google-Attributes: gidf996b,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1994-03-21 18:22:10 PST Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art Path: gmd.de!urmel.informatik.rwth-aachen.de!newsserver.rrzn.uni-hannover.de!hrz-ws11.hrz.uni-kassel.de!news.th-darmstadt.de!fauern!zib-berlin.de!zrz.TU-Berlin.DE!netmbx.de!Germany.EU.net!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!news.cac.psu.edu!news.pop.psu.edu!psuvax1!flee From: flee@cse.psu.edu (Felix Lee) Subject: Re: DIS - Mazes. Message-ID: Sender: news@cse.psu.edu (Usenet) Nntp-Posting-Host: dictionopolis.cse.psu.edu References: Date: Tue, 22 Mar 1994 02:22:10 GMT Lines: 42 Rowan Crawford: >Now the "concept" behind the maze was an optical illusion, helped out >by a simple sign. Yup. Most interesting corridor-type mazes are based upon some sort of misdirection. I was once in a small mirror maze where the path to the exit was fairly close to the entrance, but it was angled back and the mirrors were set so you couldn't see that turn as you go in. But once you backtrack to that point, the way out is fairly obvious. Doing a paper maze is quite a different experience. Tricks like that don't translate well, but you can still do some misdirection. Somewhere, I have a book with 3-d mazes of all sorts. I forget the title and author. Many of those mazes tried to make it easy to overlook the right path with visual tricks. (Also note, you can't apply the simple right-hand rule in a multi-level 3-d maze.) A recent _Games_ magazine had an interesting 2-d maze. It covered the front and back of a page, and the paths crossed the edge of the paper, so you had to flip back and forth. But you were also allowed to fold the page along a particular vertical line, any time you wanted, giving you different connections you could take. The mazes I find most interesting are nontraditional mazes. I have another book somewhere, can't remember the title/author of this one either :(, that has nontraditional mazes of all sorts. In one maze, you're shown a roadmap and told you have to drive your car to the repair shop without making any left turns (your turn signal is busted), except if you pass some certain spots in the city your parity flips and you're not allowed to make any right turns. In another maze, called Alice in Wonderland, you have a chessboard grid. Each square has arrows showing which directions you can go from there. Some squares are colored red or green. You're a piece that moves N squares in the direction of an arrow. N starts as 1. If you land on a green square, N increases by 1. If you land on a red square, N decreases by 1. This has drifted pretty far from ascii art.. :) --